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This post takes many screens of text to get to the point: we don't know how omicron evolved from its last known ancestor in Spring 2020 to November 2021, when i

This post takes many screens of text to get to the point: we don't know how omicron evolved from its last known ancestor in Spring 2020 to November 2021, when it burst into the world stage. Ergo, lab leak. It's a great deal of throat-clearing for a one-sentence argument from ignorance. Alina Chan has pointed to a more plausible alternative in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29789480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29789480

cassepipe 5y ago
The main argument is the ratio of silent vs non-silent mutations. So you are actually making a false presentation of her argumentation and I believe this is called... slander ? Although the claim that there's little chance for Omicron to have developped resistance to antibodies in an immunodepressed patient (that is without antibodies) needs to be adressed to. I would love to see a reasonable fact-based response to the article that actually take into account the points being made.
- civilized 5y ago
  > The main argument is the ratio of silent vs non-silent mutations. Incorrect. She claims four supporting lines of evidence and does not label any one of them as the "main" argument. The NS:S ratio is just the second of four presented. She is throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, because she lacks the expertise to evaluate how strong any one of her arguments is. > So you are actually making a false presentation of her argumentation and I believe this is called... slander ? No, it's not called slander. I just didn't see it when scrolling through this poorly organized and low-information blog post to extract the 1-2% of text that contained novel or interesting claims. Honest mistake. If we want to talk about this silent/non-silent ratio seriously, we need to look at the data a little more carefully and not just trust some random Twitter person's guesstimate. There is at least one other random Twitter person who doesn't agree with the ratio presented in the OP. This second person does a transparent calculation citing an authoritative source, so it's a lot higher quality claim than the first random Twitter person: https://twitter.com/TheBrettRGM/status/1471317205014900739 https://twitter.com/TheBrettRGM/status/1471317205014900739 If you look at the counts of non-synonymous and synonymous mutations for each variant listed at https://covariants.org/variants https://covariants.org/variants, you will see that all variants have a very high NS:S ratio. So either the entire evolution of the virus is being guided by mad scientists in secret labs, or we armchair virologists are over-interpreting the NS:S ratio. > Although the claim that there's little chance for Omicron to have developped resistance to antibodies in an immunodepressed patient (that is without antibodies) needs to be adressed to. Immunocompromised people don't lack antibodies. I think there is ample evidence at this point that this person is not an expert and the arguments made are probably much less strong than they may sound to a layman.

cassepipe 5y ago

The main argument is the ratio of silent vs non-silent mutations. So you are actually making a false presentation of her argumentation and I believe this is called... slander ? Although the claim that there's little chance for Omicron to have developped resistance to antibodies in an immunodepressed patient (that is without antibodies) needs to be adressed to. I would love to see a reasonable fact-based response to the article that actually take into account the points being made.

civilized 5y ago
> The main argument is the ratio of silent vs non-silent mutations. Incorrect. She claims four supporting lines of evidence and does not label any one of them as the "main" argument. The NS:S ratio is just the second of four presented. She is throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, because she lacks the expertise to evaluate how strong any one of her arguments is. > So you are actually making a false presentation of her argumentation and I believe this is called... slander ? No, it's not called slander. I just didn't see it when scrolling through this poorly organized and low-information blog post to extract the 1-2% of text that contained novel or interesting claims. Honest mistake. If we want to talk about this silent/non-silent ratio seriously, we need to look at the data a little more carefully and not just trust some random Twitter person's guesstimate. There is at least one other random Twitter person who doesn't agree with the ratio presented in the OP. This second person does a transparent calculation citing an authoritative source, so it's a lot higher quality claim than the first random Twitter person: https://twitter.com/TheBrettRGM/status/1471317205014900739 https://twitter.com/TheBrettRGM/status/1471317205014900739 If you look at the counts of non-synonymous and synonymous mutations for each variant listed at https://covariants.org/variants https://covariants.org/variants, you will see that all variants have a very high NS:S ratio. So either the entire evolution of the virus is being guided by mad scientists in secret labs, or we armchair virologists are over-interpreting the NS:S ratio. > Although the claim that there's little chance for Omicron to have developped resistance to antibodies in an immunodepressed patient (that is without antibodies) needs to be adressed to. Immunocompromised people don't lack antibodies. I think there is ample evidence at this point that this person is not an expert and the arguments made are probably much less strong than they may sound to a layman.